Why another translation of the book of Psalms, so known and loved, so often translated?
Several reasons. For me, first, it’s an act of recovery. Not of some original essence (as if there were one recoverable essence of a gathering that took hundreds of years), but of my own experience of reading poems in the language where they were written and take place.
The psalms I encounter, however halting my Hebrew, are hard to come by in English. In any language, reading a psalm can be lovely, haunting, meditative, numbing, obscure, upsetting, or electric. But, I don’t know: it’s different in most English versions. Translation is difference, I know, but it’s so different, and disappointing. In most English versions of psalms, I have trouble finding the features of biblical Hebrew I treasure most: compression, concrete detail, meaningful verbal play, and layers of significance that arise from careful sequencing or from uncertainties. Too often in English translation, syntax is slackened to the point of paraphrase, vitally sensory metaphors are steamed to limp abstractions, and living, wild ambiguities are domesticated and made docile. In such translations, gems with facets are viewed only with what Blake might call “single vision.” From that, as ever, may God us keep.
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What readers will see first, I assume, before even finishing the first two verses, are linebreaks and that temporarily troublesome space between columns, both of which replace standard English sentence punctuation. Since the earliest Hebrew manuscripts had no punctuation, the eliding of commas and periods is not so much poetic license as it is a return. Sentence punctuation has not been removed: it just wasn’t added.
(Except, that is, when it was absolutely necessary, as in “Feel for me, Lord” in Psalm 9:13 or “Hear, daughter, and see” in 45:10.)
Instead, linebreaks, which usually but not always follow a psalm’s own caesuras, do some of the work of punctuation, regulating the breath and parsing syntax. Crucially, without added punctuation, the poetry, both sound and sense, regularly regains some of the agility and alertness lost in translation. “Perk up | to the voice of my help me / my king | my God / oh to you I pray” (Ps 5:2) overlaps syntactically here as it does in Hebrew. Where does the speaker’s quoting of herself end and the imperative to “perk up” resume? Is it “Perk up, o my king and my God to the sound of my ‘help me’”? Or “Perk up to my sound of ‘help me, my king and my God’”? Punctuation forces decisions. The psalm itself eats the cake it gets to have.
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There are no rules, of course, against revising psalms. A potent revision that undermines a psalm or goes its own direction might be more valuable for some writers and readers than a translation like this, which may seem derivative. Psalms in verse that feel “spiritual but not religious” probably meet a broader audience or cultural need in the 21st century than psalms or poems that are pious.
So while I think this translation of Psalms is neither pious nor SBNR, there is almost certainly a decreasing demographic of readers who fit the Venn overlap of love of reading, love of poetry, love for Hebrew and the Bible, and utter disinterest in dogma. Faced with a life-or-death, desert-island choice, I would take the translations of Myles Coverdale and the King James Version over anyone’s poetic revisions, with the possible exception of Whitman. But I would opt for poetic revisions any day of any week instead of the snippets and scrapbooks of individual verses chopped off by many of those who read the book of Psalms most often. Some misreadings generate poems. Others get trotted out as prooftexts by those who love zygotes more than living women. Still others get etched on AR-15s. Theirs is the “map of cheats… the drifters’ path… the scoffers’ seat.” Ears to hear, but they do not hear.
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My name is Mark. I teach a course called Reading the Bible, where I meet college students, many of whom know a month of Sundays’ worth of ways not to read the Bible. Some went to Sunday School and still think every question’s answer’s “Jesus.” (Q: Does Uriah suspect that David has slept with Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife? A: It’s decidedly not “Jesus.”) Some students have read only paraphrases, simplified or amplified. Some brood or bristle when passages say more or less or otherwise than they expect. Some open to surprise.
One student stormed my office to say there’s not enough fear of the Lord in my classroom. Another, after four weeks, asked me to sign his drop slip in the hall, explaining that, as an atheist, he thought we would spend the term mocking the Bible, not taking it seriously.
Others don’t read at all.
I don’t blame any of these students. Theirs are learned, even rational responses. Few people of any age read much that takes real time. Fewer read poetry. Those who do read or recite the book of Psalms are often after the comfort of what they know.
I don’t mean to be or even sound snide. As a boy who sometimes couldn’t sleep, birch branches clicking the shutters and soffits outside, I would pad to my mother and moan: she would have me read psalms. As a hospital chaplain intern, bad at my job, I hid in the rooms of the laid-up and bored, until the beeper buzzed to break up our reading of psalms. Who wants compression or gaps or ambiguities from a chaplain or in the corners of the night?
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My other reasons for this translation are not about recovery, but about practice. I revise to pray. As Eliot Weinberger says of translation in general, it is in its way a “spiritual exercise,” a discipline. One of my favorite teachers commented in class three decades ago that it can be hard, alas, learning about the Psalms, seeing them historically, culturally, critically, to pray them.
I hadn’t spoken much in class, but raised my hand to disagree. “Not if we pray eyes open.”
That’s not to say that readers of Psalms must necessarily pray or that the book is accessible only for readers who are “religious,” a word whose value is lost by its seeming to mean whatever we want it to.
This book is not less yours if you’re not born again, not a practicing Jew, not a practicing anything. Put positively, you can read Psalms if you’re curious. Or if you condemn a tradition people use to despise you. Or if you lament the loss of a shared sense of the common good or the murder of species and vulnerable humans by the greedy and their ideologies. As a collection of poems, the book is remarkably humane, all told, despite its streaks of vengeful violence and contemptuousness, despite a fair number of psalms of cringing, self-pitying morality, and a pervasive gender bias that a few pronoun changes here and there barely address. And yet the same could be said of this week’s, or next week’s news. There is also an ethics of care here, plus a conviction that no one mourns alone, that because the only way to live forever is together and in what we preserve for the community and for our children, therefore living matters no matter how temporary it is. Seen rightly, life is stuffed and surfeited with meaning, aglow.
The Book of Psalms 